Effect of interactive vs. passive virtual reality on pain threshold and tolerance

2021 ◽  
Vol 0 (0) ◽  
Author(s):  
Juliann Saquib ◽  
Haneen A. AlMohaimeed ◽  
Sally A. AlOlayan ◽  
Nora A. AlRebdi ◽  
Jana I. AlBulaihi ◽  
...  

Abstract Objectives Scientific evidence suggests that virtual reality (VR) could potentially help patients tolerate painful medical procedures and conditions. The aim of this study was to evaluate the efficacy of virtual reality on pain tolerance and threshold. Methods A within-subjects experimental study design was conducted on 53 female students at Qassim University in Saudi Arabia. Each participant completed three rounds of assessment: one baseline (no VR) and two VR immersion (passive and interactive) in random order sequence. During each round, participants submerged their non-dominant hand into an ice bath; pain threshold and tolerance were measured as outcomes and analyzed using repeated measures ANOVA. Results Participants had both higher pain threshold and tolerance during interactive and passive VR rounds in comparison to the non-VR baseline assessment (p<0.05). Participants had greater pain tolerance during the interactive VR condition compared to the passive VR condition (p<0.001). Conclusions VR experiences increase pain threshold and tolerance with minimal side effects, and the larger effects were demonstrated using interactive games. Interactive VR gaming should be considered and tested as a treatment for pain.

2021 ◽  
Vol 11 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eszter Ferentzi ◽  
Mattis Geiger ◽  
Sandra A. Mai-Lippold ◽  
Ferenc Köteles ◽  
Christian Montag ◽  
...  

Pain perception is influenced by several factors, and among them, affect, sex, and perception of bodily signals are assumed to play a prominent role. The aim of the present study is to explore how sex, cardiac interoceptive accuracy, and the interaction of the latter two influence the perception of experimentally induced pain. We investigated a large sample of young adults (n = 159, 50.9% female, age: 23.45, SD = 3.767), assessing current positive and negative affective state with the Positive and Negative Affect Schedule (both involved as control variables), cardiac interoceptive accuracy with the mental heartbeat tracking task, and pain sensitivity with electrical stimulation on the back of the dominant hand, applying a repeated-measures staircase protocol. Males showed a significantly higher pain threshold and tolerance level than females, whereas cardiac interoceptive accuracy was not associated with pain sensitivity. The impact of sex × cardiac interoceptive accuracy interaction was significant for pain threshold only, while pain tolerance was predicted only by sex. According to these findings, the associations between pain sensitivity, cardiac IAc, and sex might be more complicated than it was supposed in previous studies. Interactions between factors impacting pain perception appear worthy of further investigation.


2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Stephens ◽  
Olly May Robertson

Background: This pre-registered study extends previous findings that swearing alleviates pain tolerance by assessing the effects of a conventional swear word (“fuck”) and two new “swear” words, “fouch” and “twizpipe”.Method: A mixed sex group of participants (N = 92) completed a repeated measures experimental design augmented by mediation analysis. The independent variable was Word with the levels, “fuck” v. “fouch” v. “twizpipe” v. a neutral word. The dependent variables were emotion rating, humour rating, distraction rating, cold pressor pain threshold, cold pressor pain tolerance, pain perception score and change from resting heart rate. Possible mediation effects were assessed for emotion, humour and distraction ratings. Results: For conventional swearing (“fuck”), confirmatory analyses found a 32% increase in pain threshold and a 33% increase in pain tolerance, accompanied by increased ratings for emotion, humour and distraction, relative to the neutral word condition. The new “swear” words, “fouch” and “twizpipe” were rated higher than the neutral word for emotion and humour although these words did not affect pain threshold or tolerance. Changes in heart rate, pain perception and were absent, as were mediation effects.Conclusions: Our data replicate previous findings that repeating a swear word at a steady pace and volume benefits pain tolerance, extending this finding to pain threshold. Our data cannot explain how such effects are manifest, although distraction appears to be of little importance, and emotion is worthy of future study. The new “swear” words did not alleviate pain even though participants rated them as emotion evoking and humorous.


2019 ◽  
Vol 70 (4) ◽  
pp. 273-282
Author(s):  
Andrea Grus ◽  
Ivana Hromatko

AbstractChronic smokers often claim that smoking improves their cognitive abilities, such as concentration. However, scientific evidence to support this claim is scarce. Previous studies gave inconclusive results, and some of them had significant methodological flaws. Therefore, the aim of this study was to test whether smoking a single cigarette affects performance across several cognitive domains. It included a group of 22 occasional smokers aged 19–29 years. Attention, working memory, and visuospatial reasoning were assessed using a within-subjects design with a control setting. There were two separate testing sessions two days apart. Half the group started with experimental and the other half with control setting. In the experimental setting, the participants completed the first block of tasks, smoked one cigarette (with a nicotine yield of 0.5 mg), and then completed the second block of tasks. In the control setting, the procedure was the same, except that the participants had a glass of water instead of a cigarette. Repeated measures ANOVA showed no significant effects of cigarette smoking on either reaction time rates or accuracy on any of the three cognitive domains. These results suggest that, at least among young, occasional smokers, smoking does not affect cognition and the claims of its improvement are probably a result of some sort of cognitive bias.


2012 ◽  
Vol 34 (2) ◽  
pp. 252-259 ◽  
Author(s):  
Amanda L. Snyder ◽  
Cay Anderson-Hanley ◽  
Paul J. Arciero

Grounded in social facilitation theory, this study compared the impact on exercise intensity of a virtual versus a live competitor, when riding a virtual reality-enhanced stationary bike (“cybercycle”). It was hypothesized that competitiveness would moderate effects. Twenty-three female college students were exposed to three conditions on a cybercycle: solo training, virtual competitor, and live competitor. After training without a competitor (solo condition for familiarization with equipment), participants competed against a virtual avatar or live rider (random order of presentation). A repeated-measures analysis revealed a significant condition (virtual/live) by competitiveness (high/low) interaction for exercise intensity (watts). More competitive participants exhibited significantly greater exercise intensity when competing against a live versus virtual competitor. The implication is that live competitors can have an added social facilitation effect and influence exercise intensity, although competitiveness moderates this effect.


1965 ◽  
Vol 21 (3) ◽  
pp. 675-683 ◽  
Author(s):  
B. Berthold Wolff ◽  
Norman A. Krasnegor ◽  
Roberta S. Farr

The differential effects of permissive and non-permissive instructions upon pain threshold and pain tolerance were studied in 43 healthy human Ss, using cutaneous electrical stimulation. Non-permissive instructions resulted in very significant increases in both pain tolerance and pain sensitivity range, but no significant changes were observed for both pain threshold and detection threshold. Therefore, Gelfand's hypothesis, stating that pain threshold and pain tolerance have differential loadings of physiological and psychological components, was supported. It was also found that the left or non-dominant hand was consistently more sensitive to pain than the right hand. This result is consistent with Wolff's and Jarvik's suggestion that lateral dominance is important in pain perception.


Author(s):  
Kenton B. Fillingim ◽  
Hannah Shapiro ◽  
Catherine J. Reichling ◽  
Katherine Fu

AbstractA deeper understanding of creativity and design is essential for the development of tools to improve designers’ creative processes and drive future innovation. The objective of this research is to evaluate the effect of physical activity versus movement in a virtual environment on the creative output of industrial design students. This study contributes a novel assessment of whether the use of virtual reality can produce the same creative output within designers as physical activity has been shown to produce in prior studies. Eighteen industrial design students at the Georgia Institute of Technology completed nine design tasks across three conditions in a within-subjects experimental design. In each condition, participants independently experienced one of three interventions. Solutions were scored for novelty and feasibility, and self-reported mood data was correlated with performance. No significant differences were found in novelty or feasibility of solutions across the conditions. However, there are statistically significant correlations between mood, interventions, and peak performance to be discussed. The results show that participants who experienced movement in virtual reality prior to problem solving performed at an equal or higher level than physical walking for all design tasks and all designer moods. This serves as motivation for continuing to study how VR can provide an impact on a designer's creative output. Hypothesized creative performance with each mode is discussed using trends from four categories of mood, based on the combined mood characteristics of pleasantness (positive/negative) and activation (active/passive).


2020 ◽  
Vol 145 (2) ◽  
pp. AB147
Author(s):  
Sarah Alonzi ◽  
Khushi Parikh ◽  
Sara Varadharajulu ◽  
Sharad Chandra ◽  
Shu Cao ◽  
...  

2020 ◽  
Vol 0 (0) ◽  
Author(s):  
Marie Udnesseter Lie ◽  
Bendik Winsvold ◽  
Johannes Gjerstad ◽  
Dagfinn Matre ◽  
Linda M. Pedersen ◽  
...  

AbstractObjectivesThe underlying mechanisms for individual differences in experimental pain are not fully understood, but genetic susceptibility is hypothesized to explain some of these differences. In the present study we focus on three genetic variants important for modulating experimental pain related to serotonin (SLC6A4 5-HTTLPR/rs25531 A>G), catecholamine (COMT rs4680 Val158Met) and opioid (OPRM1 rs1799971 A118G) signaling. We aimed to investigate associations between each of the selected genetic variants and individual differences in experimental pain.MethodsIn total 356 subjects (232 low back pain patients and 124 healthy volunteers) were genotyped and assessed with tests of heat pain threshold, pressure pain thresholds, heat pain tolerance, conditioned pain modulation (CPM), offset analgesia, temporal summation and secondary hyperalgesia. Low back pain patients and healthy volunteers did not differ in regards to experimental test results or allelic frequencies, and were therefore analyzed as one group. The associations were tested using analysis of variance and the Kruskal-Wallis test.ResultsNo significant associations were observed between the genetic variants (SLC6A4 5-HTTLPR/rs25531 A>G, COMT rs4680 Val158Met and OPRM1 rs1799971 A118G) and individual differences in experimental pain (heat pain threshold, pressure pain threshold, heat pain tolerance, CPM, offset analgesia, temporal summation and secondary hyperalgesia).ConclusionsThe selected pain-associated genetic variants were not associated with individual differences in experimental pain. Genetic variants well known for playing central roles in pain perception failed to explain individual differences in experimental pain in 356 subjects. The finding is an important contribution to the literature, which often consists of studies with lower sample size and one or few experimental pain assessments.


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